By Dave Stockton
After his military operation in Caracas on 3 January — in which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were seized and thirty-two Cuban security personnel killed — Trump turned his attention to the island itself, which has defied every one of his twelve predecessors.
With Maduro in US custody, his vice president Delcy Rodríguez was coerced into a robbers’ bargain placing Venezuela’s oil sector under effective US control. The immediate consequence was the cutting off of Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba — around 27,000 barrels per day, roughly a third of the island’s energy needs — depriving it of its most vital external economic lifeline.
Trump then turned his sights on Cuba’s remaining major supplier. On 29 January he signed an executive order declaring Cuba an “extraordinary threat” to US national security and threatening tariffs on any country supplying it with oil — a measure directed principally at Mexico. Despite presenting herself as a defender of Cuban sovereignty, ‘left-wing’ President Claudia Sheinbaum capitulated: Mexico’s oil exports to the island, which had already been cut from around 20,000 barrels per day to a fraction of that under growing US pressure, were formally halted by the month’s end. The executive order’s scope extended to any potential replacement suppliers, including Brazil, Colombia and Spain.
Estimates suggest Cuba has no more than a few weeks supply of fuel left.
Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel responded saying that such a total tightening of the blockade would mean “All spheres of life will be suffocated by the US government” and would paralyse electricity generation, agricultural production, water supply and health services — amounting to what he called “a genocide of the Cuban people.”
Imperialist Blockade
This adds to the historically long economic blockade of Cuba, initiated by Democratic President John F. Kennedy in February 1962. This prohibited trade and financial transactions between all US institutions and Cuba and penalised foreign companies for trading with it. The effects of this became even sharper during the “Special Period” of austerity in the 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states, whose trade and aid had sustained the island for nearly three decades. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996 further tightened this isolation, threatening severe penalties against any foreign bank financing trade between Cuba and third parties.
The embargo was slightly loosened during the “Cuban thaw” (2015–2017) under Barack Obama, but further tightened from 2017 onwards through Trump’s first term and worsened by the Covid pandemic, which devastated Cuba’s tourist industry. The result has been severe shortages of fuel, medicines and food, and rampant inflation — officially around 15% in 2025, but unofficially as much as 70%.
Repeated votes by the vast majority of UN General Assembly members to lift the world’s longest-running embargo have been defied by successive US administrations. Yet no state has dared to challenge, let alone break, this illegal siege and collective punishment of the island.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, himself the son of Cuban immigrants and a super hawk on regime change, has urged Trump to further interventionist measures. However, it is unlikely that Cuba’s president can be kidnapped or that figures in the top echelons of the army and Communist Party bureaucracy would fold faced with a US military intervention. More likely is that the economic stranglehold leads to popular discontent and encourages collaborators within the Cuban ‘Communist’ Party to seek a deal with Trump.
Either way, what Rubio and Trump — and the whole US ruling class — seek to destroy is the inspiration of the Cuban Revolution of 1959: the dream, realised after 1961, of a ‘socialist island’ able to defy the North American behemoth, which once inspired anti-imperialist movements the length and breadth of Latin America. That sense of Cuba as proof of the possibility of independence persisted, despite the island’s degeneration in the 1970s into a one-party dictatorship and the abandonment of all talk of spreading the revolution.
The Pink Tide of the 2000s revived these prospects to some extent: countries like Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico shipped oil and foodstuffs to Cuba in exchange for health workers and medical expertise, bolstering the perspective of a new wave of social reformism across South and Central America.
But now, with the Pink Tide ebbing across the continent, reopening Cuba to direct exploitation by US capital would be a major step in reasserting a neo-colonial Monroe Doctrine — the claim that the western hemisphere, from the northern tip of Greenland to Cape Horn, with all its valuable raw materials and markets, is closed to the US’s global rivals, particularly China. Closed too will be the perspective of reformist, socialist or left-populist development for these countries, strengthening the rise of right-wing regimes like Javier Milei’s in Argentina.
The working class of Latin America, indeed of the whole world — and above all in the United States — must do all in its power to resist Trump’s seizure of the island, whether through economic strangulation, military blockade, outright intervention, or the use of agents within Cuba.
Bureaucracy
But opposition to US aggression does not mean political support for a regime that represses its own people — as it did when it violently suppressed the mass protests against economic hardship on 11 July 2021.
Socialists must do all they can to break the blockade and aid Cuba — with no illusions in its regime, and with outright support for those fighting to dismantle the bureaucracy’s dictatorship and replace it with workers’ democracy. The bureaucracy exercises a dictatorship not only over the tiny internal private sector and against the exiled Cuban capitalist class, but above all over the working class itself — suppressing workers’ democracy and political freedom.
Moreover, in recent decades the bureaucracy has itself been pursuing a policy of capitalist restoration, modelled in part on China and Vietnam, while preserving its own political power. But, blocked from drawing on foreign or exiled capital by the US blockade, the anticapitalist features of a bureaucratic workers’ state — state ownership of industries and banking, and the monopoly of foreign trade — continue to exist, albeit in increasingly decayed form. Nor has Cuba encouraged the spread of revolutionary struggle internationally.
The Cuban Communist Party, with its eyes on China since the era of Deng Xiaoping, has turned to market-oriented reforms: legalising small and medium-sized private enterprises (SMEs) and encouraging foreign investment in tourism. Since 2021, the number of authorised SMEs has expanded from roughly 127 to over 2,000. But these reforms have driven high inflation, deepening social inequality and feeding bureaucratic corruption.
Political Revolution
To escape the crushing vice of US imperialism and renew the Cuban working class’s capacity to defend their country, a massive mobilisation is needed: not only to denounce US aggression and its collaborators within Cuba, but to demand an end to the political dictatorship of the bureaucracy in the workplaces, the farms and the streets. In short, it means a political revolution.
This means fighting for workers’ control, management and inspection of enterprises, while defending state and cooperative ownership and the monopoly of foreign trade, and transforming the bureaucratic committees — presently instruments of political repression — into elected workers’ councils. The armed forces must likewise be transformed into a workers’ militia with officers elected by the rank and file. The small revolutionary forces in the opposition must be legalised and enabled to form a genuine revolutionary party to fight for these goals.
The only way to preserve the gains of the Cuban Revolution is not only by defending whatever remains of them against US-backed counterrevolution, but by making a political revolution to displace the ruling bureaucracy with workers’ democracy. This will lay the basis for spreading an anti-imperialist and socialist revolution internationally, with the goal of a Socialist United States of the Americas.
But this perspective depends on solidarity from the international working class. In the first place, that means breaking the economic and naval blockade and opposing any military intervention. Socialists must fight to get fuel, medical supplies and food sent to Cuba, and to impose counter-sanctions on US corporations backing Trump’s aggression. Dockers and longshore workers in the US and in Italy, France and Greece have already acted in solidarity with Gaza — it is that kind of direct action, extended across the world, that is needed to stop Trump from reducing Cuba once again to the status of a semi-colony.
